Miss Marple Had an Actual Village

What does our culture lose when we do not know our neighbors?

“Everybody in St. Mary Mead knew Miss Marple; fluffy and dithery in appearance, but inwardly as sharp and as shrewd as they make them” - Agatha Christie, 4:50 from Paddington, Chapter Two.

George Ciobra via Unsplash

Long before I was born, my grandfather cut off three fingers on his left hand trying to unclog a snowblower. Whenever my grandma tells this story, she remembers how she wrapped up the severed fingers in a handkerchief, collected her two small children, and knocked on her neighbor’s door.

“Claire,” she told the woman when she answered, “Bill’s cut off his fingers. Just put them on ice for me while I take him to the emergency room. Here are the kids.”

Claire, apparently unfazed, took the fingers and the kids and did exactly as my grandmother asked. Unfortunately, the fingers dried up and the surgeon couldn’t save them. But how many of us nowadays have a neighbor - let alone close friend - who would help us try to save a bunch of our spouse’s severed fingers?

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Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s accidental detective, reminds me of Claire. In 4:50 from Paddington, a friend and neighbor rushes to Miss Marple’s house in great distress, exclaiming that she’s seen a murder. True to form, Miss Marple replies, “Most distressing for you, Elspeth, and surely most unusual. I think you had better tell me about it at once.”¹

Miss Marple is a spinster who seems to age from about sixty in her first novel appearance in Murder at the Vicarage to about eighty in her last appearance in Nemesis. She has pink cheeks and fluffy white hair and likes gardening and knitting clothes for babies. Miss Marple has lead a celibate life, one of inner calm and incisive observation. That’s why she succeeds as an accidental detective - her decades spent amid village life have made her an expert on human nature. As she puts it, “Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature.”²

I remember meeting similar old ladies in my neighborhood when I was a child, and occasionally now at church. They are the types who peek behind curtains and ask nosy questions and bring by a meal when you need it most. They often, like Miss Marple, relish retelling a gruesome yarn. But they do seem rarer now than they were twenty years ago. This isn’t just because we have lost respect for our elders and the wisdom we possess, but because our culture increasingly rejects the idea of a quiet life.

Like any Substack writer worth their salt, I often worry about the cultural impact of smartphones. I can’t imagine an amateur sleuth like Miss Marple existing today, or anyone my age growing up to be a Miss Marple type. Can you picture a neighbor who gleans her information about others via gardening, visiting for tea, and chattering the night away over cards at her neighbors’? Nowadays most of us, including me, are too distracted by screens to really notice others. If we catch something relevant about a local crime, it’s because we have a Ring camera.

Miss Marple isn’t only attentive to potential criminal activity. She knows that her nephew is engaged before he announces it. In Vicarage, she learns an important (personal) secret by observing the books another character purchases at the local bookstore. Miss Marple has a knack for knowing when women are pregnant or in love with their employers, and when men are dishonorable. But the only reason she has such a knack is because she’s spent so much of her life sitting with people, sharing dinner with them, or noticing them as they pass her garden.

In an early appearance in Vicarage, Miss Marple appears with other older women from her village in the vicar’s house, there to entertain his young wife Griselda. At one point when Griselda and Miss Marple try to solve the titular murder, Griselda says,

“I wish you’d solve the case, Miss Marple, like the time you did when Miss Wetherby’s gill of pickled shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a sack of coals.”

Quoth Miss Marple,

“You’re laughing, my dear…but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about.”³

Miss Marple understands people because she’s had a lifetime of practice interacting with and watching them. How much of that are we losing in our technology-drenched age?

George Ciobra via Unsplash

In fairness, while our technology addiction is much to blame for our increasing isolation, part of the reason why we spend less time with our neighbors now is that it’s more difficult to move to a place where everyone in a neighborhood walks to the same church and can stop at a local café on the way back. My grandma was close to Claire and other neighbors who lived close by because they lived in a small neighborhood where life revolved around the local church and school.

These kinds of neighborhoods are vanishing, replaced by ribbons of interstate, dense apartment buildings, and strip malls. All of this change seems to distance us from our neighbors. In Vicarage, Griselda complains that Miss Marple is “the worst cat in the village…and she always knows every single thing that happens—and draws the worst inferences from it.”⁴

Griselda doesn’t exactly love Miss Marple, but she accepts her anyway. She has to - pre-internet, people who lived in isolated places had to accept their neighbors or live as hermits. This is no longer the case. We may, from a distance, find our neighbors a bit nosy. But we no longer need to make peace with them.

In addition to dwindling neighborliness, Miss Marple seems like a relic to modern audiences because her life seems so uneventful. No grand love affairs, no marriage or children or career, and she barely ever travels until she is elderly and her nephew sends her on a Caribbean vacation. Miss Marple remains in the same house in the same tiny village for decades on end, passing her days in much the same way. How many of us would feel content with that?

Yet Miss Marple’s life is full of vivid color. It’s not just that her friends call her when a body turns up in their library or when they think they’ve witnessed a murder on a train - it’s that she’s invited into the family lives of those around her, breaking bread and sharing pews with the same people over a lifetime. As Miss Marple explains in The Thirteen Problems, “human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village.”⁵

Miss Marple has many godchildren spanning generations⁶, and she seems far less lonely to me than the typical married person today. After all, how many of us can appear unannounced on a neighbors doorstep? How many of us are able to casually see our friends several times a week, bringing food from our garden or useful neighborhood intelligence? Not many, I’d wager. (If your life is like this, please share in the comments)!

There is much talk of “the village” these days, typically referring to a support network of friends and family. But what if part of what we are missing is the actual village - a group of people who share geographic ties, a parish, and the same neighborhood haunts? In other words, a group of people who we do not get to choose, on whom we must rely regardless? What if losing the actual village is what has made us more isolated, less tolerant of others, more rigid and angry? Could it be that the disappearance of small hamlets like the ones where most of our grandparents and great-grandparents lived is robbing us of our intuition about humanity?

I say yes, and I wish the world had more kindly neighbors. We need to learn to cherish them again.

1. Agatha Christie, 4:50 from Paddington, Chapter Two (1957).

2. Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced, Chapter Eight (1950).

3. Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage, Chapter Eleven (1930).

4. Id., Chapter One.

5. Agatha Christie, Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories, “The Thumbmark of St. Peter” (1953).

6. Id., “Sanctuary.”